Quality Refurbished CT Scanners

Atlas Medical Technologies is a refurbisher of quality used CT scanners and used MRI equipment. As a comprehensive source for every facet of establishing a new imaging site, Atlas is unmatched in providing customer service, counsel and satisfaction on all refurbished CT and MRI scanner equipment and used imaging machines. With Atlas Medical Technologies, you'll have a seasoned partner who will guide you from site planning through installation. But it doesn't end there. Atlas backs each piece of imaging equipment we sell as well as our refurbished CT and MRI rental units, with an expert service team dedicated to sound equipment maintenance practices. You'll find Atlas is at your side, before, during and especially after the purchase of any imaging system whether it's a used GE CT scanner, mobile CT rental or MRI system. Visit our equipment pages or call your Atlas Medical Technologies consultant to determine the availability of your desired model and manufacturer of our refurbished CT scanners or new Philips CT systems.

Sensor elements

To track down any corrosion damage or cracks in oil and gas pipelines, the workers use UCSD "go-devils" equipped with Baytec P sensor strips. Because Baytec P has such high elasticity, the sensor elements can always stick close to the pipe wall, even when they pass over pipe bends or travel through narrow cross-sections, thus minimizing measuring errors.
Other specifications made on the elastomer are particularly high resistance to wear and tear and outstanding swelling resistance.

Protective strip for snowplough

An elastic strip made of Baytec P on the front of a snow-clearing machine has enormous advantages. It is easy to install and, because it is so hard-wearing, it lasts for several winters.
Apart from this, it remains highly flexible even at sub-zero temperatures, preventing damage to the roads. The outstanding resilience of Baytec P means that the protective strip will spring back from any obstacle it hits and thus prevent damage to the vehicle. With all these advantages, the snowplough can work fast without fear of being damaged

Device for light therapy

A light therapy device that specifically activates the self-healing forces, relieves the organism and triggers regenerative processes has been developed by Bioptron AG in Mönchaltorf, Switzerland. The Bioptron 2 model works by encouraging cell activation, known as biostimulation of the cell. The housing of this device is manufactured by emaform AG, which is based in the Swiss town of Gontenschwil. The company uses the Baydur® 60 polyurethane integral skin foam system, developed by Bayer MaterialScience AG primarily for the production of technical housings.

On the look-out for a lightweight, tough and rigid material which would reproduce the complex design of the light therapy device perfectly, the choice fell on Baydur® 60. Because with its excellent flow properties, this polyurethane system has proved its suitability even for the production of large moldings with complex geometries. Thanks to its mold reproduction accuracy, finely detailed textures can also be rendered.

Another argument for integral skin foam system from BaySystems is that it forms a solid outer layer which, together with a two-pack polyurethane coating, produces a highly-resistant, easy-care surface.

Baydur® 60 also delivers the goods as far as economics are concerned. The parts can be made with inexpensive aluminum molds because the internal pressure generated in the mold is particularly low. Apart from this, the integral skin foam can easily be combined with other materials, which means, for example, that thread inserts can be pre- positioned in the mold and molded in place, considerably simplifying subsequent fabrication.

Helios movie projector

A cabinet can be far more than a handy, light and robust case. This has been proved by the Helios video projector and its sophisticated exterior made of Baydur® polyurethanes from BaySystems®. Available in a variety of colors, it is perfectly at home in its environment, whether at conferences or presentations.

The Helios digital video projector from the Italian company Vidikron Industries S.p.A. has a special visual appeal in more than one sense. The highly sophisticated electronics packed inside the set are protected by a cabinet manufactured by 2a.effe of Lissone, Italy, using polyurethanes Baydur® 60 and Baydur® 110 from BaySystems®. In addition to offering a perfect combination of design and functionality, these two materials also provide a number of structural benefits, including an excellent surface finish that is ideal for high-grade coatings and gives the projector a distinctively elegant appearance

Live 3D Breadboard

Using the Live 3D Breadboard tool in TINA, you can automatically build a life-like 3D picture of a solderless breadboard (sometimes called a “whiteboard”). When you run TINA in interactive mode, components like switches, LEDs, instruments, etc. become “live” and will work on the virtual breadboard just as in reality. You can use this capability of TINA to prepare and document lab experiments.

You can either assemble the circuit step-by-step or by generating the whole circuit on the breadboard. Pick up and move parts on the breadboard using the mouse, and TINA will automatically rearrange the wiring while retaining connectivity. In the same fashion, you can select and move wires for clearer appearance. Note that you cannot change the endpoints of a wire this way–wiring integrity is preserved.

The breadboard tool is mostly intended for educational purposes to prepare laboratory experiments in a safe 3D environment. You can also use this breadboard to guide you in actually wiring a physical breadboard for lab verification.

Fingerprinting

What is a fingerprint?

Fingerprints are an early example of biometrics, the science of identifying individuals by their physical characteristics. There is no clear date at which fingerprinting was first used, some examples being from prehistory. However, some significant modern dates are as follows.

* 1880 - Dr Henry Faulds published his first paper on the subject in the scientific journal Nature in 1880. Returning to Britain in 1886, he offered the concept to the Metropolitan Police in London but was dismissed.
* 1901 - Sir Edward Richard Henry devised the Henry Classification System used in England and Wales.
* 1902 - Dr. Henry P. DeForrest used fingerprinting in the New York Civil Service.n

There is some controversy over the uniqueness of fingerprints. Even those who accept their uniqueness sometimes argue that the techniques used to compare fingerprints are fallible.

Fingerprint analysis (or Dactylography, a term mainly used in the US) is the science of using fingerprints to uniquely identify someone. Humans leave behind prints of the ridges of the skin on their fingertips when handling certain materials. The pattern of ridges is thought to be unique for each person and in practice has proved unique enough to identify the person who left the fingerprint.

Fingerprint analysis emerged in the early 20th century, when it was the first method in forensic science for unique identification. As a result of its early success, it acquired a mystique of infallibility. It has only recently been subjected to systematic analysis by investigators from outside the field.

Fingerprint examiners have certainly disagreed with one another: the case of Shirley McKie was a notable case involving fingerprints.

What is the technology involved?

Sometimes the prints are invisible, in which case they are called latent fingerprints, but there are chemical techniques such as cyanoacrylate fuming and ninhydrin spray that can make them visible.

Recently the American Federal Bureau of Investigation adopted a wavelet-based system for efficient storage of fingerprint data, developed by Ingrid Daubechies.

What does the future hold for fingerprinting technology?

In the 2000s, electronic fingerprint readers have been introduced for security applications such as identification of computer users (log-in authentication). However, early devices have been discovered to be vulnerable to quite simple methods of deception, such as fake fingerprints cast in gels.

Future application of this technology range from computer access to office and home security to automobile locks. Example of personal fingerprint scanner:

Much of this article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

audio spot light

The Audio Spotlight is a revolutionary new audio technology that creates sound in a narrow beam, just like light. Aim the flat, thin speaker disc to your desired listening area, and provide all of the sound — with none of the noise.

Virtual autopsies dissect humans and animals

Anders Persson, director of the Center for Medical Image Science and Visualization at Linköping University, Sweden, received the Lennart Nillson Award for scientific photography this year, for his groundbreaking work on improving CT scans.

His sharp, 3D images provide new perspectives on human and animal bodies, and are even used by police to perform virtual autopsies and look inside a corpse without leaving a trace.

CT scans build up an image from a series of many "slices" taken through a body by an X-ray machine, as it sweeps along its length. Software stitches the slices together again afterwards, to create a 3D representation of the body. The highest resolution scans of a person can be built up from 25,000 separate slices.

Colours are added by instructing the software to make parts with a certain density a certain colour




This scan of a patient with scoliosis, an unnatural curvature of the spine, shows how CT scans can make parts of the body transparent. Instead of colouring in certain structures, the software simply makes them transparent.

It was taken using a dual energy CT scanner, which has two X-ray units rather than the usual one. By creating slices using two different X-ray energies at once it can gather much more information. "You can actually see the ch emistry of the body," says Lennart Nillson, the photographer who the awards commemorate.

Being able to determine the actual elements at a particular point in the body makes it easier to separate tissues with similar density that would confuse a normal scan.



A live chimpanzee from Kålmården zoo near Norrköping, Sweden.

"We have taken scans of many different animals now," Persson told New Scientist. "Until now almost no images like this have ever been made of these species."

Performing a CT scan of a chimp is not easy, he adds, and requires the very latest scanners. This is because chimps have dense bodies, with strong compact bones, a lot of muscle and little fat.



Blood vessels in the head of a dead horse. This image was taken while testing a new contrast agent, intended to be injected into the veins of human bodies before a virtual autopsy.

The veins stand out sharply from their surroundings. The scan also demonstrates a processing step able to remove bones from the final image

very high-resolution scan of a dead boar; each voxel in the image is just 0.15mm across. "Note how you can see the pulp in individual teeth," says Persson. "Only with the latest dual-energy scanner is it possible to see that detail inside the very dense teeth of animals like boar and horses."

Scans of horses' teeth have shown how the soft pulp can extend closer to the surface of their teeth than suspected before, he told New Scientist, leading some vets involved with the centre to conclude that rasps should no long er be used so routinely to file down horses' teeth.






Various images created from a single scan of a living lioness.

Implant raises cellular army to attack cancer

Implants that sit in the body and reprogram a person's immune cells could be used to treat a range of infectious diseases and even cancer. In a trial on mice with an aggressive melanoma that usually kills within 25 days, the new treatment saved 90% of the group.

Because cancer cells originate within the body, the immune system usually leaves them alone. Therapies exist that involve removing immune cells from the body before priming them to attack malignant tissue and injecting them back into a patient.

Results are not encouraging, though - more than 90% of re-injected cells die before they can have any effect, says David Mooney of Harvard University.

Mooney and colleagues have now developed a technique that directs the immune system from within the body - a method that is more efficient and potentially cheaper too.

Search and destroy

Their breakthrough involves implanting cylinders of an FDA-approved biodegradable polymer into the body. The implants release a particular variety of the cell-signalling molecules called cytokines - a sort of molecular perfume that is irresistible to a certain kind of immune-system messenger cell.

These dendritic cells are attracted into the pores of Mooney's implant, where they are exposed to antigens - the molecular signatures of the cancer, bacterium or virus being treated - and a danger-signal chemical derived from bacterial DNA.

This alert signal makes the dendritic cells flee to the nearest lymph node, where they meet up with the immune system's "killer" T-cells and program them to hunt down the invading cells.

Strength in numbers

In tests, the researchers implanted cylinders with a diameter of 8.5 millimetres into mice and two weeks later injected the animals with highly aggressive melanoma cells.

Mice implanted with 'blanks' - cylinders lacking any chemical additives - developed large tumours within 18 days and had to be euthanised. However, 90% of the mice given the full treatment were cured.

"There have not been any reports of the traditional [external] dendritic cell activation having survival rates at the levels we find with our materials for the cancer model we used," says Mooney.

He suspects this is because the implants can recruit and activate very large numbers of dendritic cells. "It is a continuous process - dendritic cells are attracted to the device, take up the [cancer] antigen and [the warning signal] … and then they can leave," says Mooney. "New cells are continuously arriving while activated cells are leaving."

The team thinks modified versions of the material could be effective against a range of cancers and infectious diseases. These might also help reprogram the immune system to combat autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes, caused by immune cells destroying insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.

Silver-Coated Future

Nanotechnology, fast becoming a three-trillion-dollar industry, is about to revolutionize our world. Unfortunately, hardly anyone is stopping to ask whether it's safe.

For an industry that trades in the very, very small, projections about the potential scope of nanotechnology are gigantic. Estimates are that the industry will grow at a staggering pace in its first decade, reaching close to $3 trillion globally by 2014. The National Nanotechnology Initiative, created by President Bill Clinton in 2000, has called it "the next industrial revolution." Enthusiasts say that nanotechnology may someday enable scientists to build objects from the atom up, leading to entirely new replacement parts for failing bodies and minds. It may enable engineers to make things that never existed before, creating nanosize "carpenters" that can be programmed to construct anything, atom by atom -- including themselves. Or it may make things disappear, with nanowires that get draped around an object in a way that makes the whole package invisible to the naked eye.

As difficult as it is to comprehend how huge is the promise of nanotechnology, it's just as hard to wrap your head around just how tiny "nano" is. A nanometer is defined as one billionth of a meter, but what does that mean? The analogies are mind-boggling but not necessarily enlightening. Hearing how small things are when you're working at the nano level doesn't help you visualize anything, exactly; all it does is make you sit back and say, "Wow." If you think of a meter as the earth, goes one analogy, then a nanometer would be a marble. If you think of a meter as the distance from the earth to the sun, then a nanometer would be the length of a football field. A nanometer is one hundred-thousandth the width of a human hair. Or it is, in a particularly kinetic description, the length that a man's beard will grow in the time it takes him to lift a razor to his face.

"Things get complex down there, in terms of the physics and the chemistry," says Andrew Maynard, chief science adviser for the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, established in 2005 at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., in partnership with the Pew Charitable Trust. "When you have small blocks of stuff, they behave differently than when you have large blocks of stuff."

At the nano level, some compounds shift from inert to active, from electrical insulators to conductors, from fragile to tough. They can become stronger, lighter, more resilient. These transformed properties are what account for the infinite potential applications of nanoparticles, defined as anything less than about 100 nanometers in diameter.

The field is a textbook example of exponential growth. According to Lux Research, an emerging-technologies research and advisory firm based in New York that has tracked the industry since 2001, the total value of all products worldwide that incorporated nanotechnology was $13 billion in 2004. That figure grew to $32 billion in 2005 and to $50 billion in 2006, and Lux Research projects it will reach $2.6 trillion by 2014.

Nanotechnology holds great potential for improving our lives. It might benefit the environment, for instance, by reducing our dependence on oil through the creation of a new power grid based on carbon nanotubes -- which can carry up to 1,000 times as much electricity as copper wiring without throwing off heat -- and solar energy farms that use thin, cheap, flexible nano-engineered solar panels.

Nanostructures offer better options for rechargeable batteries, for instance, including the ones to be used in the next generation of hybrid cars. One such battery, made with nanostructured lithium-iron- phosphate electrodes, is smaller and lighter, less environmentally toxic, and can hold more energy, take a charge more quickly, and maintain a charge longer than conventional lithium batteries, according to Michael Holman, a senior analyst with Lux Research. "It's not the compound itself that's nanoscale, but the surface of the material," Holman says. The surface of the battery electrode contains nanosize bumps and ridges, "which make the surface area much higher, allowing the electrons to flow in and out of it more quickly."

In the medical field, nanotechnology is expected to lead to dozens of innovations: new methods of cancer treatment that deliver chemotherapy directly to the tumor, earlier cancer detection using nanowires that can spot derangements in just a few protein cells, new methods of blood vessel grafting during heart surgery using nanoglue formed from nanospheres of silica coated in gold.

In cancer treatment, one application involves gold nanoshells: gold-coated glass spheres no more than 100 nanometers in diameter. These nanoshells enter tumors by slipping through tiny gaps in blood vessels that feed the malignancy. Once enough nanoshells accumulate in the tumor, scientists shine a near-infrared laser through the skin, heating up the gold particles and burning away the cancer. This technique, developed at the University of Texas Health Science Center, has worked in animal experiments and is about to be used in humans.

However, the real impact of nanotechnology, at least in the short term, will not be at the dramatic level of cancer cures or a new energy grid. For now, the technology will have to prove itself in the more mundane arena of commerce: washing machines that fight germs, antiseptic computer keyboards and kitchen utensils, windshields that repel the rain, sunscreens that rub on easily and block the full spectrum of ultraviolet rays. Nanoparticles are being put into stain-resistant clothing (Haggar NanoTex pants with NANO-PEL), super light tennis rackets (Wilson nCode), antiwrinkle face creams (Lancôme Rénergie Microlift), sunscreens (Blue Lizard), computer peripherals (IOGEAR), and a wall paint made by an Australian company, Nanovations, that says the paint can "achieve better energy ratings for buildings, better indoor air quality and fewer allergy-related illnesses."

But before we hurtle off toward a nano-utopia, we need to step back and ask ourselves whether this is a direction in which we really want to go.

When an industry grows this quickly, there may be neither the time nor the inclination to ask some tough questions about possible risks. First of all, there are the health and environmental hazards. Would nanotechnology bring unacceptable risks to workers making these materials or consumers who use the final products? Would it affect air or water quality near where the nanomaterials are dispersed? Very little is known about nanotoxicology, which might be very different from the toxicology of the same materials at normal scale (see "Smaller Is Weirder").

Then there are the social, even existential, consequences. If the hype about nanotechnology contains even a smattering of truth, the technique could shake up our most basic assumptions about our place in the universe, turning us from its residents to the architects of its most fundamental elements. Might that act of hubris somehow subvert us as a species?